By building its social analytics solution on Cloudera Enterprise, Simply Measured has gained new insights about consumer sentiment and can give its large brand clients a comprehensive view of their social media activities.

Overview

Simply Measured is a social analytics company, helping brands more effectively track and understand social conversations across more than a dozen social networks so they can optimize their marketing and improve business results.

By building its social analytics solution on Cloudera Enterprise, Simply Measured has gained new insights about consumer sentiment through the ability to ingest, process, analyze, and store billions of rows of social data daily with greater speed and stability.

Access to real-time data is core to our solution, and with the Cloudera platform we can give our clients the information they need so they can be informed about what the public is saying and thinking about their brand."

Matthew Bartholomew, Senior Manager, DevOps, Simply Measured

Impact

The use of Cloudera Enterprise is helping Simply Measured give its large brand clients a comprehensive view of their social media activities. “We simplify the social market for marketers,” said Matthew Bartholomew, senior manager, DevOps, Simply Measured. “Our clients will come to us with numerous keywords they want to monitor, and we can enrich the data and deliver it quickly so they can understand consumer sentiment and optimize their marketing.”

The ability to ingest, process, and analyze data in real time is critical in helping brands respond to negative posts by consumers, such as a complaint about a brand’s product or service quality.

“Access to real-time data is core to our solution, and with the Cloudera platform we can give our clients the information they need so they can be informed about what the public is saying and thinking about their brand in that moment, and can handle potentially negative social situations as they occur,” said Bartholomew.

Business Drivers

We supported Hadoop ourselves for years with varying levels of success. We realized that we really needed to up the game on the stability of our platform.

Matthew Bartholomew, Senior Manager, DevOps, Simply Measured

In building its social analytics solution, Simply Measured engages with all the major social media apps, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, Instagram, YouTube, and more. In fact, the company processes massive amounts of data, with approximately 300,000 tweets per hour and submits more than two million calls to the Facebook API daily.

“Social networks provide very rich media in their networks—everything from text to images to videos,” said Bartholomew. “You can imagine the vast amount of data that we deal with on a day-to-day manner. We need to look at billions of rows of data every single day to deliver reports to our clients.”

When Simply Measured first launched its social analytics solution, the company built its service on a MongoDB platform. The engineering team soon moved to a self-supported Apache Hadoop environment for its data warehousing platform. However, as the environment grew, staff recognized the need for Hadoop support to deliver the desired level of service.

“We supported Hadoop ourselves for years with varying levels of success,” said Bartholomew. “We realized that we really needed to up the game on the stability of our platform.”

Solution

Running Cloudera Enterprise on AWS [Amazon Web Services] is going to give us an incredible amount of burstability so that we can scale as we need to, and we’re not paying for hardware resources that we don’t need.

Matthew Bartholomew, Senior Manager, DevOps, Simply Measured

Simply Measured moved from self-support to Cloudera Enterprise to more effectively utilize Apache HBase and other Apache technologies. Bartholomew called selecting Cloudera to help support its Hadoop environment a “no-brainer.”

“Cloudera is best of breed in support and services, and enables us to help our clients move further up in the sophistication of their social marketing,” said Bartholomew.

Streaming data from social networks is ingested into the platform using Apache Kafka and Apache Flume, then stored in Apache HBase. Simply Measured enriches the data using sentiment analytics and delivers the data to marketers through a variety of tools, including customized dashboards. Simply Measured staff also use Power BI to visualize data and deliver reports to clients.

With improved performance and platform stability, Simply Measured can expand its offerings to deliver more real-time capabilities to clients.

“In the future, interactive dashboards will become a pivotal part of our product line to allow marketers to make real-time decisions on their data,” said Bartholomew.

Many factors can impact the volume of social conversations on a specific brand or product each day. As a result, Simply Measured requires elasticity to scale its environment to accommodate huge bursts in social data when needed.

By moving its Cloudera Enterprise cluster from its data center to the cloud, the company expects to gain greater flexibility while reducing costs.

“Running Cloudera Enterprise on AWS [Amazon Web Services] is going to give us an incredible amount of burstability so that we can scale as we need to, and we’re not paying for hardware resources that we don’t need,” said Bartholomew.

Cloudera is best of breed in support and services, and enables us to help our clients move further up in the sophistication of their social marketing.